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Major Appointments for Birmingham

It wasn't long ago, with the departures of two professors--Helen Beebee (metaphysics) to Manchester and Alex Miller (philosophy of language, metaethics) to Otago--that the situation looked dicey for philosophy at Birmingham. But things have really turned around since the appointment of Scott Sturgeon to a Professorial position from Oxford, apparently with a good deal of administrative support for building the program.

At the senior level, Birmingham is appointing six Distinguished Visiting Research Professors, and it is a distinguished line-up indeed: Paul Boghossian (NYU), Hartry Field (NYU), Kit Fine (NYU), Stephen Neale (CUNY), Susanna Siegel (Harvard), and Ralph Wedgwood (Southern California). Each initial appointment is for three years, with the expectation of renewal. Each visitor will supervise postgraduate research for at least four weeks each year in Birmingham, and will also present their own work in seminars and be the focus of colloquia and workshops led by postgraduates.

In addition, the Department of Philosophy has been able to appoint three faculty to "Birmingham Fellowships"--the first five years of the appointment for research (in residence at Birmingham, of course), followed by a permanent teaching post on the faculty--and they have recruited a very impressive group of younger philosophers: Justin Clarke-Doane (meta-ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics), Nicholas Jones (metaphysics), and Jeremy Williams (ethics, applied ethics, political philosophy). (I will add as a point of personal privilege that Clarke-Doane, whom I wrote for but did not teach, strikes me as one of the handful of truly outstanding young philosophers on the job market in the last couple of years.)

Most remarkable of all, perhaps, is that Professor Sturgeon tells me that Birmingham will be filling "multiple" additional permanent open-rank, open-area positions in the current international job cycle.

It's nice to see that at a time when some departments are cutting back in philosophy, a leading research university is making a major investment in the field.

UPDATE: Alison Jaggar (political philosophy, feminist philosophy) from the University of Colorado at Boulder has also been appointed a Distinguished Research Professor.